June 29, 2012

20,000-year old pottery from China

The ceramics probably consisted of simple concave vessels that were likely used for cooking food, said Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard and an author of the study, which appears in the journal Science.

“What it seems is that in China, the making of pottery started 20,000 years ago and never stopped,” he said. “The Chinese kitchen was always based on cooking and steaming; they never made, as in other parts of Asia, breads.”

Science 29 June 2012:

Vol. 336 no. 6089 pp. 1696-1700

DOI: 10.1126/science.1218643

Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China

Xiaohong Wu et al.

ABSTRACT

The invention of pottery introduced fundamental shifts in human subsistence practices and sociosymbolic behaviors. Here, we describe the dating of the early pottery from Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China, and the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts of the pottery sherds and radiocarbon samples. The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, 2000 to 3000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere. The occupations in the cave demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.

6 comments:

"“What it seems is that in China, the making of pottery started 20,000 years ago and never stopped,” he said. “The Chinese kitchen was always based on cooking and steaming; they never made, as in other parts of Asia, breads.”

Pretty ignorant. Steamed bread has always been a staple in northern China.

It seems as though there are a great many opportunities for pottery to have been independently invented at almost any point in human history. All you need is to mold some clay (aka earth) into a pot shape, put some food in it to cook, and place it on a fire. If it's left on the fire long enough, and is the right type of clay, it will harden into a ceramic, right? And when that happens, it doesn't take a genius to see that this is something useful.

I'm not an expert on ceramics, so maybe I'm missing something, but I see no reason why pottery shards couldn't be found from almost any human settlement from almost any period.

I looked at the picture of 20,000 pottery fragments from this cave online and not convinced of antiguity. It could be a fake and recently made. This requires international scientific scrutiny. Also they need to demonstrated more than one sample of evidence in other regions in China. The early potteries are abundant in Amur and Japan region dating 13000BP - 16000BP.

Over the latest decade the oldest pottery have showed up in the area around the Tartarian straigth - such as Jomon and Amur.

A rough decade ago we were all convinced that pottery started in the middle east - along with agriculture and "civilisation". Toady we now that even agriculture - in all its various forms of domestication - have happened in different parts of the globe - simultaniously.

All the more reason to not jump to any rash conclusion about "the first" pottery "in the world" - although the digs and discoveries at the pacific rim of Eurasia is truly facinating - as well as enriching to the historical sciences.

All the more reason to relax the need of a clear-cut "genesis" - as in place of origin - for pottery. As said here - it could have been invented a number of places - still not known - simultaniously. For obvious reasons.

Time to get of Gordon Childes mechanistic view of evolution - and admit that in most cases of archaeology the abscense of evidence is NO evidence of absense. :-)

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